Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

FrostWire is a free, open source Java downloader, BitTorrent client and media player, which comes with a built-in multi-tracker search (like TPB, Yify, Mininova, etc.) as well as YouTube and SoundCloud search/download support. The application is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Android.

The app is not new but I've never covered it on WebUpd8 and after receiving a review request and trying it recently, I decided it deserves an article here since it's a really good app, despite being a bit bloated.

Probably the most important FrostWire feature is its ability to search multiple BitTorrent trackers in the same time as well as YouTube, SoundCloud and Archive.org. The search results are filtered by file type audio, video, images, documents or apps so the results don't get cluttered with stuff you don't need which is much needed, considering the multiple sources the app is able to search:

"FrostWire will connect to all the major BitTorrent indexes of the internet and pre-fetch torrents (via the libtorrent DHT or via HTTP if it can't find it on the DHT), it will then index locally all the available metadata that's indexed by the torrent file, as the user searches, the local index gets better and better to yield richer and instant results".

For YouTube, the app allows downloading the audio only or the complete video and you can choose which format to download (1080p video downloads are supported).

Another very important FrostWire feature is the ability to play audio and video while downloading from the BitTorrent networks and previewing the content from YouTube or SoundCloud before downloading:

For this, the app comes with a built-in media player but you can also use external players such as VLC. For YouTube and SoundCloud previewing though, only the internal player is supported or at least that was the case in my test.

There's even an integrated media library which organizes your downloads in various categories (audio, video, images, programs, books/docs) and there's also a huge list of online radio stations available and an option to add more stations (one note though: many of the stations I've tried didn't work):

And finally, the last major feature available in FrostWire is the ability to easily share content with your friends or between multiple devices (such as your desktop and Android device) - for how to send files from an Android device to a desktop, see THIS video. It's important to mention that once you share a file, it's available to everybody on the BitTorrent network so keep this in mind before using this feature.

Under the hood, FrostWire uses frostwire-jlibtorrent, a swig Java interface for libtorrent for the BitTorrent part and MPlayer for media playback, along with H2 database and Lucene indexes for the search. For more information, see its GitHub page.

The application was updated recently (v6.1.3) with lots of fixes (including a fix for saving downloads on external drives), Windows 10 compatibility, fixed Soundcloud search and download, resumable Archive.org downloads as well as important changes on the way the BitTorrent engine works which allowed simplifying seeding settings.

Download FrostWire

Download FrostWire - binaries available for Linux (64bit only): deb, rpm and generic, Windows, Mac OS X and Android as well as source